George Tabori and the Jewish Question

Figure 1.

George Tabori in My Mother’s Courage at Theater der Jugend (1979). Photo: Oda Sternberg.

Ever since the production thirty years ago of his first major play, The Cannibals, George Tabori has been turning Jewish characters inside out to make a farce out of the Jewish Question. This “question”—What to do with the Jews?—was first posed by German politicians and philosophers at the end of the eighteenth century in an effort to reform and civilize Jews (who were thought to be immoral and contaminated) living in German principalities, and was constantly revised and debated throughout Europe up through Hitler’s time. Tabori’s perspective is unusual. Contentious, provocative, and irreverent, Tabori seems almost obsessed in his persistent efforts to demonstrate theatrically that Jewish suffering is not so unique and that the Jewish Question involves so many other complex questions about persecution and racism that pursuing it is almost absurd. This absurdity intrigues Tabori: the absurdity of the Holocaust, the absurdity of Hitler, the absurdity of anti-Semitism, the absurdity of enlightened attempts to explain mass murder, genocide, xenophobia, and the persistence of racism today. Tabori is one of the few contemporary dramatists who revels joyously and profanely in all the grotesqueries we have managed to conjure up in response to anti-Semitism. But he is not cynical. Rather, there is an unusual optimism in his comic antics, something he himself has related to Jewish humor, that gives us glimpses of how we might get beyond the Jewish Question and related questions of racism and prejudice.

But before I discuss Tabori’s confrontation with this problem, I need to address two important issues: first, Tabori’s personal history as a Hungarian Jew who lost his father and many relatives during the Nazi period; second, the meaning of the Jewish Question, or what I mean the Jewish Question to be.

Born in Budapest in 1914, Tabori was raised in a secular Jewish family. After completing high school in 1932, he traveled to Berlin, where he worked in a hotel for two years, returned to Budapest, and then went to London to join his brother. There he became a journalist and war correspondent. In 1941, he returned to Budapest on an assignment; this was the last time he saw his father and many other relatives. In 1944 his father was killed in Auschwitz; his mother miraculously escaped a deportation. Tabori spent the war years as correspondent for the BBC and the British army, part of the time in the Middle East, and part of it in London. After the war, he began writing novels that occasionally touched on topics concerned with Auschwitz and the plight of the Jews, but it was not apparent at this time that they would become a dominant theme in his writing.

In 1947, Tabori went to the United States, first to work in Hollywood as a screenplay writer and later to New York, where he became involved in the theater. The Cannibals, a grotesque comedy about cannibalism in a concentration camp, was staged in New York in 1968. Up to this point Tabori had insisted he would never return to Germany. However, he was approached by a German theater agent to produce the play, and this coincidence brought about a great productive change in his life:

I believe that God resides in chance. It was by chance. That is the creative principle for me. The 1960s in America were an emancipatory break with the past. I learned a great deal during that time, but it had become economically more difficult. . . . I found America exciting. I enjoyed living in New York for 20 years, but I never felt at home there despite having two children and a place to live. I also kept my British passport. It was as if I unconsciously never separated from Europe. Other emigrants felt the same way. Thomas Mann returned, [as did] Hans Sahl and Fritz Körtner. After my experience with The Cannibals in New York, I thought, if I do theater at all, then I must do it in Germany. Moreover, there is no better place for theater than in Germany. It was difficult to separate from America on all levels, but I have not regretted it. ¹

When asked how he felt about possibly encountering one of his father’s murderers in a restaurant or on a train upon his return to Germany, Tabori responded:

I cannot think this way. Even during the war I could not think this way. I cannot encounter people in such a sweeping way. There is no such thing as “the Germans.” There is a Peter von Becker, Helmut Kohl and Edith Clever. I must encounter everyone personally. Everything else for me is evil and a lie. When these sweeping comments are occasionally made, I become irritable. Whether one talks about women, young people, or the theater—all these abstractions are actually a comfortable way to reify people. To make a “thing” out of a person means clearing the way for Hiroshima or Auschwitz. I can’t do that! I never felt anything like that when I came back. ²

Tabori made Germany and Austria his home. For the past twenty-seven years he has lived in many cities in Germany and currently resides in Vienna, where he has produced and directed many of his plays. A household name in European theater, he is virtually unknown in America. This does not mean that Tabori feels completely “at home” in Europe. But the return to Europe has certainly had a great impact on him with regard to his thinking about Jews, because he has been compelled to be sensitive to growing xenophobia and anti-Semitism and has witnessed monstrous acts of violence in Germany and Austria, not to mention the former Yugoslavia and the Eastern European countries. This accounts for a marked increase of plays that focus on the Jewish Question in the last fifteen years: Mutters Courage (1979), Der Voyeur (1982), Jubiläum (1983), Mein Kampf (1987), Weisman und Rotgesicht (1990), Die Goldberg-Variationen (1991), Nathans Tod (1991), and Die Ballade vom Wiener Schnitzel (1996).

Some critics have maintained that Tabori has constantly been working through the trauma of his father’s death in those plays that deal with the Holocaust or father-son relationships. Others have been interested in how he depicts Auschwitz and Jews on stage. But few have explored the dramaturgical methods and settings of his play in relation to Jews and anti-Semitism in general. Before I endeavor to do this, a few remarks about the Jewish Question are necessary.

In 1781–83, Christian Wilhelm Dohm, the Prussian superintendent of archives and a firm believer in the humanitarian principles of the Enlightenment, published a book entitled Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden [The civic improvement of the Jews], in which he argued that Christian Germans bore the responsibility for the miserable conditions of the Jews and should do away with most of the proscriptions against them. It unleashed a debate about the Jewish “problem” and/or “question” that has stamped the relations between Germans and Jews in the public sphere, if not Christians and Jews in the West, up to the present. Though well intentioned, Dohm predicated his Enlightenment ideals on the notion that Jews were morally corrupt and contaminated. As Paul Lawrence Rose has demonstrated in his highly significant study, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany, “For Dohm, the Jews are a potential class of productive citizens whose acceptance into Prussia will benefit the state’s prosperity and security. The Jewish Question is thus reduced to the basic principle of raison d’état.” ³ Dohm, however, did not want to grant all Jews emancipation, but rather only privileged Jews from the proper social status. As Rose remarks,

The fundamental theme that divided opinion in the period before 1850 was not rights, but Jewish “national character” and its relation to German national character. It was a theme that dominated several distinct phases of the argument. During the Enlightenment phase of the 1780s the “improvability” of Jewish national character had been seen by rationalist and statist commentators as vital to making the Jews useful to the state and so justifying them “in the eyes of reason.” When rationalism yielded to nationalism two decades later, the “unimprovability” of Jewish character—as evidenced in its permanent “alienness” from German character—became a central theme across the spectrum of German public opinion from right to left. ⁴

From the beginning, the Jewish Question was framed by male Christians and did not allow for Jewish representation. The Göttingen professor Johann David Michaelis, also an alleged supporter of the Enlightenment, wrote a reply entitled “Dohm über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden” (1792), in which he asserted that the Jews were corrupt to the core and did not need any help. If they were allowed to become farmers and artisans, then Prussia would turn into a despised and defenseless Jewish state. In addition, Michaelis argued that as long as Jews did not abandon their Mosaic laws, they did not deserve to be placed on an equal footing with German citizens. ⁵ Michaelis was answered by the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, but for the most part, appeals for equal rights for Jews in the public sphere either fell on deaf ears or were refuted both by proponents of the Enlightenment like Kant and Fichte and by opponents of the Enlightenment like C. L. Paalzow (Die Juden, 1799) and C. W. F. Grattenauer (Wider die Juden, ein Wort der Warnung an alle unsere christlichen Mitbürger, 1803).

The general acknowledgment that there was a “problem” caused by the Jews led to hundreds if not thousands of debates and anti-Semitic publications and actions up through Auschwitz, with the onus placed on Jews to prove they were either worthy of assimilation or could be trusted not to defile the purebreds of various nations in Europe and North America. It is not by chance that one of the most important books published by one of the leading European philosophers at the close of World War II was Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive (1946), in which he made the famous statement, “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” ⁶ In making this claim Sartre was bent on showing that the Jew was a social construct and that Jewish identity had often been dependent on the situation into which each Jew was forced. That is, certain roles were imposed on Jews throughout history that were not of their choosing. “Thus,” Sartre argued, “it is no exaggeration to say that it is the Christians who have created the Jew in putting an abrupt stop to his assimilation and in providing him, in spite of himself, with a function in which he has since prospered. . . . To know what the contemporary Jew is, we must ask the Christian conscience. And we must ask, not ‘What is a Jew?’ but ‘What have you made of the Jews?’” ⁷

Though there have been hundreds of later studies of Jewish identity and the ramifications of Auschwitz for Jewry and Judaism, Sartre’s work is significant because it was one of the first, post-Shoah, to turn the Jewish Question upside down. That Tabori is in his debt can be seen in his essay “Unterammergau oder die guten Deutschen,” where he states:

The decisive point is not whether Jews are good or bad, but the killing of the Jews. Sartre believed there would be anti-Semitism so long as there was one living Jew. There is thus no Jewish hallucination. Our anxieties are real. They are in our guts. The matter here does not involve fostering special tact or piety. On the contrary. I welcome The Jew of Malta or Fassbinder’s Frankfurt exposé, for freedom—like pregnancy—cannot be relativized. There is no such thing as small freedom, and a limited freedom for me would mean an unfree freedom. It is a contradiction in and of itself. ⁸

Like Sartre, Tabori shifts the focus of the debate away from fixed identities and essentialism. He does not deny that there is something Jewish about Jewish people, but it has more to do with their sociopolitical situation. Israel is ironically only proof of Sartre’s thesis that Jewishness and Jewish existence are circumscribed by the Jewish Question. To quote Tabori again:

As far as Israel is concerned—to break one of my own silences—I view this country like absurd theater, the last Jewish joke, whereby the first one is the Bible. Thirty years after Auschwitz the rabbis are still discussing in detail what a Jew is. Everyone knows it, except the Jews. But only a few goys have understood the sacredness of a newborn child in the so-called promised land, the rarity of unexpected gifts. (How would it be if, after 1945, there were only two million Germans left in Europe?) What is bad about Israel is the goyishness of its weapons because Judaism is, like Christian heresy, an ethos of losers. Unfortunately success corrupts, and complete success corrupts completely. But Israel is more a family than a country. I am not a great family man. I never go to temple. I would not be a Jew if the Germans had not reminded me about it. Even that was an unrequested gift for which I can only be grateful. To be sure, the price for this conversion was too high. ⁹

Tabori does not mean to implicate only the Germans. He does not point his finger at any one cause or group of people for stamping Jews in a denigrating way. Rather, he wants to grasp the conditions that prevent the autonomous formation of identity and foster prescribed roles and stereotypes. Moreover, he is not interested in the Jewish Question per se, but how it is related to other questions in the sociopolitical situations that give rise to racism, oppression, and exploitation in general. The decisive point here, as he might say himself, is that he does all this from the ethical perspective of the Jew or the loser. In his hands the question becomes, “What have you done to create your own Jew lately?”

To show how Tabori has elaborated on Sartre in unique and varied ways, I want to examine four key plays, Die Kannibalen, Mein Kampf, Weisman und Rotgesicht, and Die Ballade vom Wiener Schnitzel, and conclude with some remarks about his lyrical play, Mutters Courage. But first, I want to say a few words about Tabori’s method of composition. Even after twenty-seven years, he still writes first in English and has his writings translated into German. In addition, he often writes a story or novel about a particular topic before he conceives a drama. In short, Tabori’s writings are like works in process. He is constantly translating, rewriting, rehearsing, and reproducing his plays.

This is also the case in his work with actors. As Hajo Kurzenberger has demonstrated, Tabori has developed his own brand of Method acting and role playing over the years for use in rehearsals, which is closely tied to his political and aesthetic conception of the theater. Tabori constantly seeks to break down stereotypes and question the roles that we are expected to play both in life and on the stage. In the exercises he has developed with actors, he has sought to make them consciously aware of themselves and their surroundings so that they can emotionally become the characters that they play. At the same time the actors are never supposed to lose a sense of who they are and their own present, for they must be capable of falling in and out of their roles. Kurzenberger maintains that “what concerns Tabori is the human being in his or her special historical form in which personal development and social character are inseparable and at the same time present. ‘Life,’ ‘true feelings,’ the ‘self,’ or whatever the formulations of shorthand theater dialogue may mean, are thus not uncoupled from the individual and sociohistorical development of every person and from the historical experiences that determine the image of the human being of our century.” ¹⁰

The rehearsals and performances are means for the actors to test their own identities and to create an impact on spectators so that they, too, will be impelled to question their personal and social roles. In this regard Tabori was very much influenced by Brecht’s methodology and his estrangement effect. The written play itself undergoes transformations and is also tested, so to speak, each time it is rehearsed and performed by different actors in different venues. The play sets the situation or the parameters in which the exploration of real-life roles and socially constructed roles can be explored. In the works analyzed below, the reversal of the Jewish Question is crucial for grasping how Tabori wants the play with roles to be played.

The situation in all four plays is a predicament beyond the control of the characters, and Tabori implicitly asks: Who and what are determining how Jews should lead their lives? In The Cannibals, dedicated to Tabori’s father, eleven prisoners in a concentration camp are ordered to eat Puffi, one of their fellow prisoners, whom they have accidentally killed. If they refuse to eat Puffi, they will be killed. The uncle, the central character in the play, is obviously Tabori’s father, who resists the cannibalism. In Mein Kampf, Herzl, a poor Austrian Jew, encounters Hitler in a flophouse in Vienna and is confronted with a choice of saving Hitler from death, fully aware that if he does he might be contributing to a future catastrophe. Arnold Weisman is stranded in the New Mexico desert with his mongoloid daughter Ruthie in Weisman und Rotgesicht and desperately seeks to find a way to get to New York, where he is supposed to strew his dead wife’s ashes over the Hudson River. In Die Ballade vom Wiener Schnitzel Alfons Morgenstern feels that he is being pursued by Nazis in contemporary Vienna. His brother-in-law, a psychiatrist, takes him to an animal clinic where the animals are to conduct a therapeutic racist experiment with him to rid him of his alleged hallucinations.

A concentration camp, a home for the poor on the Blutgasse in Vienna, a desert in New Mexico, and an animal clinic. These are the settings in which Jewish protagonists are compelled to play out their identities, to establish who they are and what they might be. The times are 1944 in the concentration camp, 1907–10 in the Viennese home for the poor, the 1980s in New Mexico, and contemporary Vienna. But the past is recalled to be contrasted and compared with the present. Most important is that the Jewish protagonists are not the only victims in these plays, nor are they depicted sentimentally as victims. In Die Kannibalen, there are a gypsy, a Greek, a homosexual, and a German. In Mein Kampf, there are other poor people, including Hitler himself. In Weisman und Rotgesicht, there is a Native American. In Die Ballade vom Wiener Schnitzel, there are the animals. The Jewish character identifies himself in each of the plays in his interactions with other oppressed creatures. Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer has astutely commented that “whenever the intellect forms itself in pairs in Tabori’s plays and at least one Jewish figure appears, the self-problematization of Jewish existence is implied from the very beginning. That is why the respective partners are not necessarily on the same level.” ¹¹

The characters’ interactions are determined by situations that are not of their own making, which accounts for the absurdity of the plays. No matter how they may want to determine who they are and what they can do, the characters can succeed only to a limited extent, if at all. The limits are the negative stereotypes that have infiltrated their own thinking and behavior and the actual political situation in which they find themselves. Instead of being cast in a heroic role as victim, the Jew appears almost ludicrous; the victimizers and the forces of victimization are invisible, but their racism and anti-Semitism pit the oppressed against one another in a series of bizarre struggles, encounters, and duels—Jew versus other Jewish and non-Jewish concentration camp victims, Jew versus Native American, Jew versus Hitler the bumbling Austrian clown, Jew versus animals—through which Tabori asks what it means to be Jewish today, or what are the politics of identity, especially when everyone else knows what it means to be Jewish.

Tabori’s plays are so powerful because he does not pretend to have an answer and even mocks the possibility that there might be an answer. The plays reverse the Jewish Question by making fun of the absurd situation in which victims are cast against one another. Here, if anywhere, is hope. In the carnivalesque depiction of unusual characters who try to sort out their destinies, knowing full well that they are condemned to be straitjacketed, we find a glimmer of optimism. Tabori levels all stereotypes, prejudices, and myths so that the actors and audience can catch sight of the distinct personality of each character portrayed on stage. His blasphemous humor destroys the bigotry and exploitation that pass for propriety. Nothing is proper in a Tabori play, neither language nor behavior. In the course of the action, the Jewish Question is reformed and remolded to appear as our question—the question that spectators must ask of themselves: Have they dutifully created their own Jew recently?

Challenging stereotypes with humor forms the basis of Tabori’s dramaturgical practice in these plays. Interviewed by Peter von Becker, Tabori stated,

For me everything actually involves the essence of the joke, everything that constitutes its Jewish tradition. But such humor is also found outside Jewish culture. For example, you find this kind of humor in England. It stems from the realization that the content of each and every joke is a catastrophe, no matter whether it is of a personal or historical nature, and treating this catastrophe with humor or transforming it into a joke, I find, first, legitimate—and second, like Luther said, “I can’t do it any other way.” At one point in these plays the joke stops. I believe, when a joke or the comic aspect does not have something deadly serious as content, it does not function for me. And I am only speaking about jokes because for me they are the most perfect literary form. The joke is short, absolutely logical, and the point is always a surprise. It is also a demonstration of dialectics. ¹²

Of course, in Tabori’s plays we must talk about negative dialectics, because there is no sublation. The plots form sick jokes that have catastrophes as their content and end in catastrophes. Starving concentration camp victims accidentally kill one of their own in Die Kannibalen and then argue whether he should be eaten. In the end, most of them are eaten by the ovens or gassed. A New York Jew gets stuck in the desert and becomes involved in a verbal duel with an Indian to see who has suffered most in Weisman und Rotgesicht. The Jew wins the duel but dies of a heart attack. A Jewish intellectual in Mein Kampf pleads with Mother Death to save Hitler’s life and will thus be responsible for the Holocaust. In Die Ballade vom Wiener Schnitzel a Jewish reporter who evaluates the food at restaurants has a breakdown after he is called a Jewish pig and then is forced to become a dog to overcome his paranoia. All these Jews are not what they seem to be. All these Jews are compelled to deal with the absurd situation in which they find themselves. The joke is on them. They define themselves in response to the joke. They are all losers and winners at the same time.

But it is not only the general plotlines that form sick jokes in the Jewish tradition of Galgenhumor—and here we must remember that Tabori has in mind Freud’s important study The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious—but the constant joking in the plays that serves to undermine the role expectations of both actors and audience.

There are many examples in Tabori’s plays, but what I should like to underline here is that his humor compels everyone participating in one of his theatrical events, including himself, to question who they are, what their stereotypes are, and how they use language. And here we return to the optimism of Tabori’s sick humor. Despite the constant failures of his losing Jews, they have a steadfast devotion to pleasure and play. It is their comic resistance in the face of death to being pegged and cataloged as Jews that, paradoxically, makes them Jewish. If Tabori has an answer to the Jewish Question, then it is in his insistence on keeping Jewish humor alive and transcending the absurd with dignity. This transcendence is perhaps what makes My Mother’s Courage so unique.

Of all Tabori’s plays, My Mother’s Courage is undoubtedly the most poetic and most optimistic. A play about storytelling, memory, and representation of the Holocaust, My Mother’s Courage is Tabori’s eloquent depiction of how an ordinary Jewish housewife accidentally survives a deportation to Auschwitz and does not seek to claim heroic status for herself. Her son, Tabori the playwright and Tabori the character, wants the world to remember her story about her chance encounter with a German officer, who unpredictably helps her to escape her ordained fate. This play is not so much about the suffering of the Jews as about the tender relationship between a mother and a son, whose droll sense of humor enables them to recapitulate and transcend a bizarre incident in her life that involves the question of courage in the face of Auschwitz.

With an obvious reference to Brecht’s Mother Courage, Tabori portrays a mother who is not especially cunning, but more honest and naive. Despite her honorable character, she survives. This is the absurdity of the entire situation, not that she is picked up by two incompetent Hungarian policemen, but that she is forced by a nebbish to request permission to return to Budapest, and in the end she finds herself seated in a train facing the German officer, who is a murderer and also her savior: within the boundaries set by the murderer/savior, the Jew must try to make sense out of the world. Instead of violating the murderer/savior, the mother and son in this play gain a measure of pleasure and dignity by detaching themselves from the past that they re-create with humor. In effect, this is Tabori’s joke on the perpetrators of anti-Semitism and racism—to refrain from violence and to delight in all the chances that life provides to rise above the absurd.